


Touch

by ruanyu



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, Hurt Loki (Marvel), Loki (Marvel) Angst, Loki (Marvel) Needs a Hug, Loki Feels, Loki Whump, POV Loki (Marvel), Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-26
Updated: 2015-06-26
Packaged: 2018-04-06 07:09:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,288
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4212600
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ruanyu/pseuds/ruanyu
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He can still feel. They have left him that.  Senses. His mind is a dark space into which words imprint themselves, rolling sonorous and multisyllabic. Sight (ophthalmoception), hearing (audioception), taste (gustaoception), smell (olfacoception), and touch (tactioception).  Five senses. How mortal, how unthinkably limited, he had thought once with the mockery of an immortal and invincible god. But now. His skin is the only contact he has with his surroundings, vulnerable thin skin, alert and quivering, responding to the faintest stimuli. Touch.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Touch

Pain traces through what remains of what he once was and the burning fierce unrelenting hurt is how he knows he is still alive. Everything else has been taken from him. Everything but pain. He can still feel. They have left him that. His mind is a dark space into which words imprint themselves, rolling sonorous and multisyllabic. Sight (ophthalmoception), hearing (audioception), taste (gustaoception), smell (olfacoception), and touch (tactioception). Five senses. How mortal, how unthinkably limited, he had thought once with the mockery of an immortal and invincible god. But now. His skin is the only contact he has with his surroundings, vulnerable thin skin, alert and quivering, responding to the faintest stimuli. Touch.

Except not. Touch conjured up gentle contact of skin on skin. He has not been touched, not since he was brought here. He has been pierced and stabbed and punched and kicked and burned and he has felt all of that, registered it on his frail all-too-mortal body. But what he has felt has not been touch.

He cannot hear himself but he knows they have driven him past the point of screaming more than once because his mouth ripped the stitches over his lips. The stitches are a cruel joke: the Chitauri had scoured his mind and found the memory of what the dwarves had done to him and it had pleased them. They know too that his brother had began with taking away his words and stilling his silver lying tongue and now it is leathery and dry as a dead thing in his clamped shut, sewn-closed mouth. He was already muzzled like a dog when he was led away in chains. His words were the first to go. Then his magic. His words _were_ his magic, he wanted to say, as he knelt before the Allfather, who looked down upon him not with anger but with what was worse: with hurt and love and dissappointment and for a moment he had been thankful he was mute and could not defend himself.

But what is he without words? When Odin cast him out, Frigga's eyes were bright beneath a dignified film of tears and he wanted to have her arms around him, wanted to be that young and sure of a mother's love again. Not innocent, never innocent, but young enough to be embraced.

They soften the blow by telling him his brother too was banished - even in this Thor was first, he thinks with bitter bleakness and wants to laugh. But Thor didn't have the enemies Loki had made. They didn't understand. His parents - his not parents - say something about their hope that as a mortal he will learn about the fragility and preciousness of life. Even the life of an old human who faced him in the street and refused to kneel - a stubborn elderly man who compared to the centuries they use to measure their age had mere days left to live and yet would not give up.

Loki had not thought humans could be courageous. He had felt no more respect or care for them than he would for an insect crawling on the ground. Ants. They had been ants to him. He could not understand why he should have cared. Why Odin or Thor should have cared.

Now he is one of them and there are so many needs a creature such as him requires: not only the sustenance of food and water but for the temperature to be not too hot and not too cold and he needed somewhere to excrete that was not where he lay and he needed water to cleanse the filth that adheres to his skin and he needed clothes and bedding. So many _needs._

Yet he discovers in the fragile nature of his mortality a stubbornness to live that surprises his old self. This frail body has been broken again and again and his lungs still labor, his chest rises and falls, however falteringly. How many breaths since the last time they set his nerves on fire with the pain of their torture?

Telling time could only be estimated by the cruelty applied on the receptive map of his body, ready to be marked anew.

He doesn't hear but he feels them coming.

The cold wet floor trembles beneath his curled-up shivering body, his knees tucked up to his chest and his arms around his shins. He flinches away, already braced for the blows, for the pain that is sure to come, and he is deaf but he knows he is making sounds, he can feel the strain on the stitches.

Someone touches his shoulder and he jerks back before he realizes: That was touch. Not hurt. Touch.

He stills, tentatively submitting, waiting, cringing but waiting, for the hand to descend again. It does, and he feels touch, again.

What is happening? He wants to see but the waxy substance that seams his eyes shut won't let him. His hand is being brought up even as he fights desperately to tuck it back safe against his trembling mortal body, and he can feel himself making sounds, pitiful whimpering sounds.

They force his hand up until his fingers touch metal and then catch on the raised edge of something unexpected. Something that hums powerfully beneath his trembling fingertips. He can feel the energy thrumming and he knows what is beneath his hand. He knows who this is. Remembers the man with the dark volatile eyes and the mocking smile. Remembers the blue flickering magical light in his chest, the one who wore the metal around his wrists and had aimed all his arsenal at Loki and told him to make a move, Reindeer Games.

Tony Stark.

 

AVAVAVAVAVAVAVAVAVAVA

 

"Somebody tell me I'm not seeing what I'm seeing here," Tony muttered.

"You're seeing what you're seeing," said Clint, and his voice is a rough brittle bridge between genuine shock and gritty revenge.

Thor's expression is terrible to see - his face is slack and his eyes like bullets - but the curled up shivering man they see before them is even more terrible to look at. Loki had left Earth beaten but not cowed, his eyes over the metallic muzzle shifty and his darting glances promising a revenge Tony could tell he was already plotting.

When Thor came to them and told them Loki had been taken and he needed their help, they had never imagined what they would find in the warren of caves Thor brought them into. Their one-time enemy had become a pitiful creature of skin and bones, naked and curled around himself in a fetal position.

He was not blindfolded, but his eyes were sealed shut with some crusted white yellow wax and his ears were stuffed with the same waxy white subtance and his lips were sewn shut and blood bubbled from the punctures.

He reacted to them coming closer, tightening his curl around himself, his chains rattling. Tony finds himself on one knee beside the god he can only think of as a man. A tortured, broken man. Loki's skin was cold and pallid and he made soft, heart-breaking sound of fear as Tony touched the back of his hand. Thor moved to pick him up, powerful arms scooping under his legs but Loki's whimper became a mangled moan, his fingers clutching desperately at Tony, like a child about to be ripped away from his mother.

"Wait," Tony said, softly. "Let me. He knows who I am."

Loki clung to him like a limpet the whole way to the jet, head tucked against his neck, eyes and lips and ears sealed, and all Tony could do was reassure him by keeping his hand on the hum of the arc reacter.


End file.
